ENGL 248/ERS 288: Literature for an Ailing Planet
M/W, 11:30-12:50, HH 150, Winter 2023
Instructor: Andrew McMurry
Email: amcmurry@uwaterloo.ca
Office: HH 265
Office Hours: In my office or virtually. Email me for an appointment; I can usually accommodate your schedule.
Recognize whose lands these are on which we stand.
Ask the deer, turtle, and the crane.
Make sure the spirits of these lands are respected and treated with goodwill.
The land is a being who remembers everything.
You will have to answer to your children, and their children, and theirs—
The red shimmer of remembering will compel you up the night to walk the perimeter of truth for understanding.
—Joy Harjo, from “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings”
Calendar Description:
Can the humanities change how cultures relate to environments and the natural world?
This course surveys environmental thought in works of literature and in popular culture.
Course Overview and Objectives:
There not many left who are still unaware of the rippling environmental crises affecting Planet Earth, and not many fewer who aren’t worried or even despairing about the future. As the great Catalan cellist Pablo Cassels said during the fascist nightmare that was mid-20th century Spain, “The situation is hopeless; we must take the next step.” But when the situation is hopeless, what exactly does a next step look like? Well, one next step is simply to understand how our past steps got us into this mess. Then, armed with that understanding, we can proceed to a further step: envisioning a new, better future. In this course we will consider how patterns of thought toward nature are embedded in literary and visual representations of places, people, and the extra-human world. At the same time, we will explore how recent forms of literary and visual art are participating in the ongoing revision of the cultural practices that disfigure our relationships with one another and the surround-world. Materials studied in this course are multidisciplinary and will include poetry, short stories, essays, novels, film, music, and art.
The objectives for this course are essentially four-fold: first, to develop and hone critico-creative thinking skills through reading, writing, and talking about relationships between literature and environments; second, to become conversant in ways that art forms have reflected--and contributed to--environmental thought; third, to take pleasure in the study of literature, nature, and the arts for their own sake; and, finally, to assemble a personal portfolio of reflections, representations, and curatives for the ailing planet.
Required Texts:
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future
Waubgeshig Rice, Moon on Crusted Snow
All other readings and materials will be accessible on our Learn site. You don’t have to come to class with print copies (though it helps!) but make sure you can readily access the readings on your laptop or tablet.
Required Work:
The things you do in this course might be a little different from what you’re used to. Most often in an English classroom you’d write research or interpretive essays of various lengths, maybe some discussion posts, possibly an exam. In this class you’ll do none of those things. We’ll be following an alternate line of practice-based inquiry called “research creation.” Simply put, you’ll explore some of the ideas we encounter in the course through field studies, creative writing, visual design, and non-scholarly genres of personal writing. It turns out that you yourself, as a modest witness of the ongoing human experience on the ailing planet, are a good source of wisdom about what sickens it and what might cure it. Detailed descriptions and grading criteria of these submissions will be posted on the Learn site, but you can get a sense of what they consist of below:
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1. Manifesto: your code, your principles (graded to spec). 5% |
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2. Cosmogram: where do you dwell? what environs you? (graded to spec). 5% 3. The Image of Wide Scope: your token, emblem, memory, or needful thing (graded to spec). 5% |
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4. Relays (short pre-class or in-class exercises that help lay the groundwork for your project or prompt you to think about the readings): graded for completion only; deadline sensitive. 15% |
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5. Three major submissions: evaluated and graded, but the grades are provisional. 10% + 15% + 20% The Haibun: sort of a descriptive piece of prose with a haiku chaser The Appreciation: we’re good at criticizing everything maybe let’s praise something The Field Guide Entry: identifying and de-reifying the actants at this moment in the Anthropocene narrative |
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6. Final project of wide scope: evaluated and graded. 15% 7. Participation: This is an old-fashioned discussion-based course. I'll lecture, too, especially to introduce new ideas or explain concepts or contexts. But much of the time we’ll participate in Socratic dialogue. Come to class having read the material; be prepared to engage thoughtfully. Note: I don’t keep attendance. You are all adults, and you’ve actually paid to be in this class! But given the nature of the course design, it’ll be hard to excel if you don’t show up. 5% 7. Symposium: in the last week of the term you’ll share some of your work with your peers. 5% |
Deadlines and late policies: All the submissions will have deadlines, but you can have an automatic extension of 48 hours should you need it. You don’t have to ask. If you’re going to need more time, I will deal with requests on a case-by-case basis. But it’s prudent to make requests before the deadlines, not after.
Schedule Of Readings And Assignments
Jan 10/12
T: Covid 19 strikes again
Th: Introductions: syllabus, readings, assignments, format of course; some poems
Jan 17/19 Fish Week
T: Hemingway, “Big Two-hearted River”; Bass, “Fish Story”
Th: Fish poems + Basho
F: manifesto due
Jan 24/26: Words & Grammars
T: Kimmerer, from Braiding Sweetgrass; MacFarlane, from Landmarks;
Th: Ammons, “Corson’s Inlet”; Neidecker, “Lake Superior”; Dickinson, “The Great
Chain of Being”
F: haibun due
Jan 31/Feb 2: The Animal Question
T: Sedaris, “Untamed”; Green, “Canada Geese”; White, “The Death of a Pig”
Th: Coetzee, from Elizabeth Costello
F: cosmogram due
Feb 7/9: Anger and Its Sidekick Violence
T: Malm, from How to Blow Up a Pipeline; Jensen, from Endgame
Th: Dickey, “The Last Wolverine”; Llewelyn, “Allochthon”
Feb 14/16: Hope and Its Discontents
T: Music and land art (slideshow); Freud, “Transience”
Th: Scranton, from We’re Doomed. Now What?; Hayhoe, from Saving Us
F: appreciation due
Feb 21/23 Active Recovery
Reading Week
Feb 28/ Mar 2 Sustenance
Resilience: Moon on Crusted Snow
Mar 7/9 Prefigurations
T: Solarpunk fiction
Th: TBA
F: Image of Wide Scope due
Mar 14/16 Resilience
Film: Beasts of the Southern Wild
Mar 21/23 The Fray
T/Th: Utopia/dystopia: The Ministry for the Future
F: field guide entry due
Mar 28/30 The Fray
Con’t
Apr 4/6
Symposium; project of wide scope due
Other Information
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